


Dinner Time

by SpinningYarns



Category: Newsies - All Media Types
Genre: M/M, but a happy ending for all!, feelings of unnecessary aloneness, sexuality related confusion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-30
Updated: 2020-12-30
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:01:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28422105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpinningYarns/pseuds/SpinningYarns
Summary: When Crutchy starts talking about a girl he knows, Jack completely misreads the situation.
Relationships: Crutchie/Jack Kelly, Kid Blink/Mush Meyers
Comments: 1
Kudos: 12





	Dinner Time

**Author's Note:**

> Part of the Newsies Winter Holiday Exchange 2020!  
> The prompt was fairly open ended, but Jack's happiness was requested and has, I think, been granted. My first fic of any kind in... a hot second. Enjoy!

Dinner was Jack Kelly’s favorite part of the day. There were other times he didn’t mind, like crisp fall mornings when the sun rose pink over the buildings, or late nights staying up talking about the things that really meant something. But those were special, surprises that entered his life without being looked for and without any promise of staying.  
Dinners, though- dinners were every night and they always went the same way and the predictability of it, the expectation of those hours, kept Jack going during the day when nothing else could.  
He would leave as the sun came up for the factory where he worked now. Being a newsie had been good, but he had grown out of it, as most of his friends had, and he had eventually taken rooms with Crutchy and they had found jobs. Crutchy worked in typesetting and Jack had gone into factory work. It wasn’t exciting, but it paid the bills.  
So they would wake with the sun, pass a bleary “good morning” as their eyes cleared over a very quick cup of coffee, and they would take whatever was left over from the previous night’s dinner in a lunch pail.  
The day would pass interminably for Jack, engaged in painfully repetitive work, and Crutchy would set type for the afternoon and evening editions, thanking his lucky stars that the morning edition was somebody else’s job.  
Then, when the bell rang at the end of the day for Jack to leave the factory, he found that his eyes opened a little wider, he stood a little straighter, and there was a spring in his step as he left the factory for home- where Crutchy was waiting for him.  
It was funny, he thought sometimes, that he had never fallen into the habit of calling Crutchy by his given name. It wasn’t as if he didn’t know Crutchy’s real name, but it just seemed so strange, after all these years, to call him anything else, even though he sometimes got odd looks when they were overheard. But Crutchy had assured Jack that he didn’t mind, and Jack would have found it upsetting to be called “Francis”, so the old nicknames were all they ever used. Crutchy was Crutchy, and Jack was Jack.  
And now they rounded opposite corners of the block at the same time, as they sometimes did, and Jack could see Crutchy grin and raise a hand in greeting. He waved back but kept quiet; it would only be irritating to others for him to shout down the street, no matter how glad he was to see his friend.  
The two young men matched paces, which mostly meant that Jack slowed down, so that they met at the bottom of the stairs and Jack held the door for Crutchy as he started up the stairs to their second-floor flat, the lowest one they had been able to find or afford. Crutchy swore he didn’t mind, but Jack knew perfectly well that he would have preferred the ground floor. You knew things like that, when you were this close.

Once they got inside, there were fifteen or twenty minutes where they caught up on their days while they bustled around the little tenement, putting things away and washing up and changing into clean clothes. Then they met in the kitchen to put dinner together and set the table and Jack basked in the homely domesticity of it all. Crutchy’s uneven footsteps as he retrieved the seasoning from the cupboard and the way he looked up at the ceiling when he taste-tested the meal were the sights and sounds of home to Jack.  
As Crutchy was the better cook, it fell to Jack to set the little table, set out glasses of water, and carry the food over. Then the two of them sat down, took a ritual deep breath that seemed to let out all the stresses and cares of the day, and tucked in.  
“It’s delicious, as usual,” Jack said, settling back in his chair at the end of the meal. He stretched his arms out and rolled his shoulders to loosen them.  
Crutchy grinned and rubbed ink-stained fingers on his pants, adding to the existing smudges which might never come out. “Thanks,” he said. “It wasn’t much.”  
“Like I could do that,” Jack joked, mostly teasing himself. It was all part of the nightly ritual. From there, the talk turned to whatever was on their minds.  
“I heard from Blink the other day,” Crutchy said, chasing crumbs around the plate with his fork.  
“Oh, yeah?”  
“Yeah. Him and Mush got a place. Like us.”  
“Good for them!”  
“He said we should visit sometime. They’re not far from here. Maybe a Sunday afternoon, or a Saturday evening.”  
“That would be nice.”  
In truth, Jack was only halfway listening. What he was really doing was memorizing Crutchy’s face, as if he hadn’t seen it a million times. And he had, of course; he knew Crutchy’s face better than anyone else’s except maybe his own and since they didn’t own a mirror, even that was questionable. But it was hard not to study Crutchy’s features as the evening’s last rays of light played across them, turning his smile and laughter into the brightest thing in the room and then, when he looked momentarily concerned, casting a shadow across his eyes that made Jack want to run to him.  
He couldn’t do that, of course. Naturally, Crutchy wouldn’t feel that way about him and Jack wasn’t about to ruin his closest friendship with talk of feelings that… well, that as far as he knew, nobody else even felt.  
So Jack treasured the time he had in this apartment with Crutchy every evening. Someday, surely, Crutchy would find a nice girl and move out to be with her. Jack knew it would happen eventually, because Crutchy was… well, just so much fun to be around. He was friendly and cheerful, but he could be contemplative and even melancholy sometimes. Someday, some girl would know, as Jack did, the way Crutchy’s eyes lit up when he was about to tell a really bad joke or the way they went soft and twinkled whenever he saw a dog. She would know the kind of soft sigh that meant Crutchy needed Jack to ask what was wrong, because he didn’t know how to start talking about it. Some girl would know how Crutchy’s hair fell across his forehead when he slept and the way he adjusted without waking against some ache in his leg and then smiled a little when it eased and his sleep deepened again. Some girl would eat his cooking or cook for him and accept his thanks.  
Jack tried not to think about where he would be while all this was going on, because he truly didn’t know. The truth was that he just couldn't picture himself without Crutchy. When he thought about that girl who would come along someday, Jack’s stomach twisted because he knew what Crutchy’s life would be like, but he couldn’t picture his own.  
This evening, Crutchy was in one of his cheerful moods and even Jack’s own misgivings about the future faded in the light of Crutchy’s cheerful talk about his co-workers, who were all characters and provided a wealth of stories. By the time they went to sleep, Jack had almost forgotten his worries.  
These worries were back in full force the next day, though, because Crutchy came home from work full of stories about Anna, the new girl who was learning to set type. He was helping to teach her and as far as Jack could tell, Anna was the best thing that had happened to Crutchy in a long time. She was quick to pick up the work and good at it, too. She said funny things when the foremen weren’t listening and she had kept Crutchy laughing all day. Jack told Crutchy that she sounded like a lot of fun, and of course she and her sister ought to come to dinner sometime. But he didn’t entirely mean it.

Crutchy kept coming home from work with stories about Anna and he continued to mention the idea of bringing her over for dinner- with her sister, of course, chaperonage was important. Jack kept saying that it was fine but every time Crutchy got too close to setting a date for the dinner, Jack invented some new reason that it wouldn’t work out. He hoped that Anna would get a new job, or that Crutchy would just start seeing her officially and he could drop the act. It was becoming increasingly difficult to come up with excuses.  
They played this back and forth for several weeks until finally Crutchy apparently couldn’t take it any longer.  
“I think you don’t want her to come here,” he said to Jack, very bluntly one evening. Jack, who had been stewing about this exact thing, immediately leapt to his own defense.  
“Of course I do,” he said. “I always want to meet your-” he swallowed hard “-other friends.”  
“You liar,” Crutchy said. He was smiling, but a little sadly and Jack was suddenly genuinely sorry to have hurt his feelings. He immediately resolved to be a better friend, to make sure that Anna and her sister came over soon, and to be the kind of supportive friend Crutchy really deserved, instead of the slightly bitter one that he really was.  
And then Crutchy said something that stopped Jack cold.  
“You know I’m just trying to have her over because I think she’ll like you,” Crutchy said. It was the way he had pronounced “like” and Jack must have looked at him oddly because Crutchy clarified. “You know- I think you’d… be good together. You’d like her too.” Same emphasis.  
“Oh,” was all Jack could think to say. “Oh, uh, thanks. That’s… really thoughtful.”  
“You don’t have to,” Crutchy responded and although his voice was so gentle and so kind, Jack heard some kind of obscure pain behind it. He couldn’t identify the tone, but he turned his attention more fully to Crutchy and studied his face, trying to understand.  
“She’d be really good for you,” Crutchy said in that same tone, falsely cheerful, slightly sad. “And she’ll like you. Everyone does.” His voice faltered and his eyes dropped and then so did the pit of Jack’s stomach.  
“Yeah, I bet she’s great,” he said. “If you want to introduce us- no, I don’t mean it that way. I mean, I believe any friend of yours is great and I’ll be happy to have her here.”  
“I still don’t think you take my meaning,” Crutchy said and Jack found that Crutchy wasn’t meeting his eyes at all.  
There was a very long sigh and then Crutchy looked up, straight into Jack’s eyes, wearing the most false smile Jack had ever seen.  
“You know,” he said in a voice that choked slightly. “I wish- wouldn’t it be funny if…” and then he broke off abruptly and Jack could see tears behind his eyes, even with that ridiculous smile.  
“If the world was different,” Jack murmured. He didn’t know quite why he said it, but he had been gazing so deeply into Crutchy’s eyes as he spoke that he was barely seeing his… friend, or whatever Crutchy was to him.  
They sat like that for a moment, Jack’s eyes fixed on Crutchy’s face, Crutchy trying to overcome the tears and the false smile and then something in Crutchy’s expression shifted and he leaned forward, looking astonished.  
“Wait,” he said, still sounding choked up. He was silent again and then with a look that was now somewhere between hopeful and confused, he said, “Jack… excuse me asking but do you mean-” he looked away and wet his lips and then looked back to where Jack sat, still trying to figure out exactly what was going on.  
“Jack, do you mean if the world was different, we- you and I, I mean- not Anna- we…”  
Jack saw what was happening all of a sudden and blushed so deeply that he could feel it. “Yeah, I mean, I think I do-”  
It was hard to say where the conversation had wandered off to, exactly, but when Crutchy began to laugh and cry all at once, Jack felt sure they had at least ended up in the same place. It wasn’t exactly in his nature to show emotion, the way it was so easily a part of Crutchy’s nature, but Jack couldn’t keep the pleasure out of his eyes and smiled in a way that he knew Crutchy would understand.  
Finally Crutchy wiped his eyes on his shirtsleeve and smiled just for Jack.  
“Come on,” he said, standing unsteadily up from the table. They went over to the little couch they had been able to find for their room, and they sat down on it, knee to knee as the young and in love will do, and in the most handsomely un-selfconscious way, Crutchy reached out and took Jack’s hand in his and they talked long into the night, saying all the things that they had kept to themselves.

There was not so much talk of Anna after that, although she and Crutchy remained friends. She did come over to dinner, with her twin sister, and both women turned out to be just as friendly and clever and fun as Crutchy had said. They would be good friends, Jack knew, and never anything else.  
More than ever, he looked forward to coming home at dinner time. Now, when he and Crutchy met at the door, Jack could lay a hand solicitously on Crutchy’s shoulder if he struggled on the stairs or drop a kiss on his cheek- or his lips- when Jack stood up to clear their plates from the table. And most of all, he treasured the feeling of Crutchy’s hand in his when they sat on the couch and talked long into the night.  
The one thing that continued to eat at Jack was the sense of secrecy. It was lucky the two of them had found each other, because they must be (Jack reasoned) the only two men in the world who were… quite like this. And he didn’t want to draw attention to their unusual situation, so he kept quiet.  
But surely it would not be possible to feel this way about someone and not shout it from the rooftops and share your happiness with all of New York City and far beyond. He mentioned this to Crutchy one day and Crutchy only sighed and agreed. It didn’t exactly make Jack feel better, or even really less alone, since they were the only two of their kind, but he took comfort in having Crutchy there.  
Eventually, as Crutchy had promised Blink, they made plans to have dinner together. Blink had suggested though a passed note that he sent home with Crutchy that they save up a few pennies and go have dinner at a restaurant. “Let someone else clean up!” he had written.  
Jack, who usually cleaned, thought this sounded like a fine idea and when finances permitted, Crutchy and Blink picked a date and it was agreed that Jack and Crutchy would stop by Blink and Mush’s apartment on their way to the restaurant.  
As he frequently did, Jack spent the walk over reminding himself that he shouldn’t hold Crutchy’s hand in public, even though he badly wanted to, and generally keeping himself in check. The freedom to relax at home had more or less spoiled him, he thought. But when you were the only two of your sort in the whole world, it would be more than foolish to give yourself away like that.  
Crutchy was just a little tired by the time they arrived, so Jack suggested that rather than wait in front of the building, they ought to just go up and sit down for a few minutes so that he could rest. Despite how little he liked adjusting plans for his own accommodation, Crutchy was sufficiently in need of a rest that he agreed and they went up to the door and knocked.  
After a moment, nothing had happened, so Jack knocked again and then, as though they were still back in the lodging house, he simply tried the door.  
When it opened, Jack stepped back in surprise and nearly knocked Crutchy over. Blink and Mush were suddenly on their feet, blushing and smoothing their shirts and hair and looking flustered, but Jack knew what he had seen.  
Jack’s jaw dropped and he let himself into the apartment, struggling for words. Crutchy was behind him but Jack was focused on their friends.  
He looked so bewildered that Blink was immediately on the defensive, stepping protectively in front of Mush. Mush looked very shy and more than a little scared and he put a calming hand on Blink’s shoulder.  
“What?” Blink asked sharply.  
Jack’s jaw worked up and down once or twice and then he wheezed out, “You… too?”  
Now Blink and Mush looked surprised. “Huh?” was all Blink could manage, but Crutchy had caught Mush’s eye and they were much quicker on the uptake and began to laugh.  
“Yeah,” Jack finally said. He shook his head as if he couldn’t quite believe what was going on, and then put an arm around Crutchy’s shoulder and said proudly, “Us too.”  
Blink and Mush exchanged the kind of grin that Jack knew well from the way he looked at Crutchy and Mush said in his soft, gentle voice, that reminded Jack that Mush would accept anyone, just the way they were, “You two look happy.”  
“We are,” Crutchy agreed. “And you! I guess I shouldn’t be so surprised.”  
“Probably not,” Blink agreed, putting an arm around Mush and patting his shoulder fondly. “Well, I think this changes our dinner plans. Mush, whadda you think?”  
“I think I know just the place,” he said.

On the walk, having been given no further information, Jack reflected that he ought to just stop being surprised by things. Enough had happened that it just wasn’t worth the shock anymore- Crutchy cared for him, in the first place. So he wasn’t literally the only person like him, the only man who preferred men. There were two of them, and now, it seemed, there were four.  
And then Blink opened the door to the restaurant, a little hole-in-the-wall kind of place and for the second time that night Jack nearly fell over in surprise. There was music playing and the delicious smell of food that somebody else would have to clean up, but what had stopped Jack in his tracks was the sight of two men, right there at a table in the middle of the room, holding hands.  
Jack looked around in delighted surprise to find that there were, indeed, several couples of men. Two of them kissed and Jack’s mind bloomed with fresh possibility. The more he looked around, the better he liked the place. There were ladies in dresses whose mothers probably hadn’t dressed them that way, and men in suits who might have traded clothes with those ladies. There were people of all combinations dancing together, free and easy in a way Jack had never imagined he could be.  
A waiter showed them to a table and as Crutchy’s hand slipped effortlessly into his, Blink grinned at both of them and said simply, “Welcome home!”


End file.
